Why Does God Allow Evil? - Email from a Skeptic

In my experience, it is the most commonly asked question by honest skeptics: "If God is real, if God is personal, if God loves us, why does God allow evil?" A proper understanding of this issue not only provides great insight into the nature of God, it ties together a comprehensive understanding to some of life's ultimate questions: the answers to my origin, meaning, morality and destiny!

The question of evil was brought into clearer focus in an email I recently received from a skeptic:

The skeptic's point is well taken because the Bible states that one of God's attributes is love. "He who does not love does not know God, for God is love." (I John 4:8) In the book of Romans, Paul the Apostle stated that the invisible attributes of God "are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead."¹

However, what the skeptic is saying, in effect, is this: "If your God is love, I see no evidence of that attribute in creation. All the death, disease, pain and suffering seems to be out of place if this God of yours is love. Surely an all-powerful God could, and a loving God would, eliminate all evil. Since evil exists, then no such God exists."

To answer this objection we need to examine some principles of logic, the nature of God, the nature of man, the nature of love and the nature of evil.

When someone states that they do not believe in God because a good God would not allow evil, they make a fatal error in logic. First, the recognition of evil is the recognition that certain actions are "right" and certain actions are "wrong." But how do we determine what actions are morally right and morally wrong? We discern this on the basis of a moral law: a universal sense that certain states of affairs are right and others are wrong. Even most atheists will admit that certain actions are universally wrong and, conversely, universally right.

For example, no one could seriously argue with the statement that it is better to love a child than to torture it. The point is that there is an innate, universal sense of right and wrong within all of us. What is the basis of this moral sense? Some would argue that it is based on cultural customs or traditions. But can this be so?

The famous atheist Bertrand Russell once debated a Christian who asked him if he believed in right and wrong. Russell replied "of course." Then he asked him how he determined what is right and wrong. Russell replied that he determined right and wrong on the basis of his feelings. His opponent replied, "Well, in some cultures they feel it is okay to eat you, and in others they don't. Which do you prefer." The point is that social customs, attitudes, traditions or feelings cannot determine a universal sense of right and wrong.

A universal sense of moral right and wrong can only come from a source outside of ourselves: a transcendent source, a moral Lawgiver. So the recognition of moral law is by default the recognition of a moral Lawgiver. To argue that the existence of evil proves that there is no God is equivalent to stating that the existence of moral law proves that there is no Lawgiver! It's like declaring that the Chrysler automobile that I drive proves without a doubt that there is no Chrysler Motor Company!

Atheists often present the problem of evil to theists as if it is a fatal argument for the existence of God. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, it is an absolutely unsolvable problem for the atheist. How does the atheist explain evil-the sense of moral right and wrong-in the absence of a moral Lawgiver? They can't! If there is no moral Lawgiver, then there is no way to explain the sense of moral wrong and moral right we all possess. C.S. Lewis said that evil is God's megaphone to a non-believing world. Evil speaks of moral law. Moral law demands a moral Lawgiver, and it is He that we call God!

A second principle of logic we need to consider is the fact that an apparently evil state of affairs will often bring about an even better state of affairs. The problem is that we often do not recognize this fact until we have the advantage of hindsight. In my own field of medicine I see this on a daily basis: the process of childbirth, surgical intervention, and many medical therapies often present physical pain (an evil state of affairs according to non-theists), and yet they bring about an even better state of affairs: improved health. Physical pain is often highly beneficial as well. When a child touches a hot stove, the nervous system sends a neurological signal to the brain which is perceived as pain (a form of evil). Yet without that sense of pain, an even worse state of affairs would arise: the destruction of the limb.

The skeptic might object that while this provides a partial answer to the problem of evil, it does not address some of the most disturbing forms of evil: war, murder, rape, incest and the senseless death of the innocent.

The problem of human evil is rooted in the nature of God and the nature of love and the nature of mankind. I argued in last month's Personal UPDATE that God is a personal being because an impersonal force is an insufficient agent to create personal beings.² What is the greatest passion of personal beings? I would argue that, above all else, personal beings desire personal relationships with other personal beings. So it makes sense that God, as a personal being, would desire to create us in such a way that He could have a meaningful, personal, and loving relationship with us. But this has a severe price.

Let us consider the nature of love and its consequences. I cannot experience love from you unless you have the capacity to do otherwise. If you have the capacity to not love me, and you choose instead to love me, then that choice has validity. It has meaning. You cannot have a love relationship with a computer. It is pre-programmed to serve you. Love requires choice: unencumbered choice. And that's where the problem lies.

When God created mankind, He too had a choice. If He created us as beings that were pre-programmed to follow and serve Him, there could be no love. But, if He created us with the capacity of choice, the capacity to love and serve Him, and the capacity not to do so, then there is the possibility of relationship: the possibility of real love. As a personal being with the capability of creating us in the first place, it makes sense that He would want to create us as personal beings with the capability of choice (free will) and, thus, the capability of love. But where there is choice and the capability of love, there is also the capability to choose wrong and to do great evil.

But the skeptic says, "why did God do this when he knew in advance that the result of free will would be so disastrous? Did this God of love not care that war, murder, rape and so much senseless violence would be the result of his choice to give us free will?" A real life illustration will help us to understand.

During my 15 years as a physician I have seen an enormous amount of physical suffering. During that time I have had five children in my practice die by disease and injury. All of these children came from Christian families. Several months after the death of one of these children, the child's mother was in my office and was very distraught over her loss. She asked me, "Why did God allow this? I love God. Why did this happen?"

What could I say in this situation? Rather than providing an answer I asked her this question. "You have three children. One of them has died. If you could go back to the time before you had any children, with the knowledge that one of them would die this horrible death, would you have children again?"

After a long pause, with many tears in her eyes and a broken heart she said, "Oh yes. Oh yes. yes I would. Because, you see, the love and the joy and the happiness I have received from my children far outweighs the pain, suffering and misery I experienced from the loss of that one child. Oh yes. Oh yes. I would have children again."

In this tragic story we see an incredible insight as to why God allows evil to exist. As discussed earlier, a loving God can allow an evil state of affairs to exist if, in allowing it to occur, it brings about an even better state of affairs. For this woman, the loss of her child was an unequalled and tragic evil. But, with the advantage of hindsight, she said she would do it all again because the love she received as a result of being a mother outweighed the evil state of affairs in the death of her child.

In the hypothetical scenario I presented to this woman, with the advantage of hindsight (foreknowledge in this case) she was in a position comparable to God's before He created humankind. Because He is outside time and knows all things, He knew that there would be tremendous pain and suffering as a result of His decision to create a people with the capacity of choice and, consequently, the capacity to sin (moral evil).

But God, like this mother, knew that the love He and his human creatures would experience would outweigh the pain and suffering that would result from His decision to create us as He did. But the consequences of God's decision were not unforeseen. They were foreknown!

The skeptic that emailed me stated, in effect, that if an all-powerful God did not eliminate evil, then He was a devil! The implication is that the removal of all evil would permit a better, more loving world. A truly loving God, the skeptics assert, would have desired and created such a world because it is clearly superior to the one we have. Any God that did not follow this logic was not a God of love, but an evil tyrant.

As we have seen, this logic crumbles under its own weight. The existence of evil is the "side effect" of creating a world with love. But as we have seen, there are compelling arguments that a world possessing both evil and love is superior to a world where neither is possible. For God to eliminate evil, He would have to eliminate our capacity of choice and thus our capacity to do both evil and good. And such a world is inferior to the one we have: one where love is possible, despite its inherent evil. What kind of God would do this? Only one kind. A God of love.

So, how practical is Christianity? The Bible presents an infinite Creator with the very attributes we would expect when we examine the things that are made. And God, as a personal Being, in order that He might have a love relationship with us, gave us the capacity of choice. In order that we might have a practical revelation of His love, His wisdom, His power, His glory, He became one of us in the person of the Messiah, Jesus Christ.

In order that we might not suffer the penalty of our evil choices (sin), He, like a loving father, paid the penalty for our sins. He allowed his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to be murdered on a Roman cross (arguably the most evil act in the history of the universe, if He is indeed God's Son). But this act of great evil gave rise to an even better state of affairs, and the greatest act of love in the universe: paying the penalty for the wrong choices we make, which were the result of the way He created us in the first place! In the cross of Christ He has provided a full pardon from the consequences of the evil in our lives. Consequently, we cannot look to God and declare that He is unfair. Far from being a devil, in this examination of the problem of evil, God becomes the hero of the plot and the solution to the problem of evil. And it all hinges on LOVE. Indeed, God is love.³ What must we do to receive this pardon?

Thank you so much for your posts!

I hate to get into the time discussion so soon, but I believe it is relevant to the excellent issues you have raised. The points I wish to “bring to the table” have to do with science and how I personally believe it relates to these Scriptures with regard to ”time”.

xzins: Judas saw Jesus heal; and then he stole money. He saw Jesus feed 1000's and then he stole money. He saw this again and again, and he continued to steal. When the resurrection of Lazarus came around, and he traded Jesus soon afterward for 30 pieces of silver, he had fully qualified himself to be "selected" by God for the fulfillment that God intended for him.

P-Marlowe: God knew his heart. When God hardened his heart, he did not make him do something he didn't want to do. He simply made him want to do that which he wanted to do all that much more. Hardening of the heart is hardening of the resolve. It is allowing and assisting you to have the courage of your convictions.

We get into the discussion of predestination frequently on the science threads. There it is commonly called determinism or strong determinism. Basically, scientific materialists (scientists whose work is limited to the physical realm) and metaphysical naturalists (atheists) to one degree or another are deterministic, i.e. they believe that the physical realm is an unfolding of the physical laws over time.

When applied to discussions of the mind and consciousness, strong determinism means that the mind and therefore, the soul, in their view is an epiphenomenon of the physical brain and nothing more. This view is held by virtually all atheists, some well-meaning but short-sighted scientists and some scientists who have an extreme left-wing agenda, such as Lewontin and Pinker.

In their worldview, everything is determined, there is no such thing as free will, and thus people like Hitler were only doing what they were predestined to do, i.e. there is no personal responsibility since there can be no free will if everything is determined. To avoid these social implications, scientists like Pinker offer convoluted reasoning, which in effect suggests that a Hitler should be punished for doing what he had no choice in doing, because that is what we must also do, we have no other choice as we are unfolded over time.

Obviously, all of these materialist views crash and burn in the face of Judeo-Christian theology, but you may find it curious that they also crash and burn in the face of mathematical physics.

The bottom line is that, according to mathematicians and physicists (and of course, Genesis 1:1) there was a beginning. That pulls the rug completely out from under the materialist worldview, though most of them haven’t figured it out just yet.

In other words, even if all the physical realm were strongly determined there must nevertheless be a non-physical aspect to “all that there is” that transcends space and time in order for there to be a beginning. This is true regardless of multi-verse theories, imaginary time theories and ekpyrotic cosmology – because they all require that there must be a beginning.

We Christians of course recognize the non-spatial, non-temporal existence as the spiritual realm. Many mathematicians however, trying to stay out of the domain of theologians, appeal to Platonism. Under radical Platonism, the mathematical structures themselves exist. For example, pi is the same here as it is anywhere in the cosmos, geometry exists and the mathematician only comes along and discovers it, etc. In reading the works of Platonist mathematicians and physicists, the word “God” can be substituted for the word “math” – and the relevance is clear.

So what does all of this have to do with Judas, Pharaoh and the discussion of free will?

It has to do with the mechanism of free will. If the physical realm were “all that there is” there could be no such thing as free will. From the physical mortal perspective, we experience life like a movie, one frame at a time. But God is beyond spatial and temporal dimensionality, so he sees the movie (the physical realm) all at once. He speaks of the future as if it were already past, because from His viewpoint outside space/time, it is. (Jesus, Revelation, Daniel, the prophets) Being God, outside of space/time, when He says a thing, it is already done. Therefore, His judgments are irreversible (Romans 3:25, Revelation 13:8) and He cannot lie. (Titus 1:2)

A Lurker may be thinking “Whoa, so it sounds like the materialists are right – that we are just unfolding irresistibly – all is predestined.” Indeed, I am saying that would be true except for one very important thing. God breathed into Adam (neshama) and he became a living soul (Genesis 2:7). So even though we, the descendants of Adam, are “in” the physical realm, we are also living souls originally built for the spiritual realm. I’m asserting that future events in the physical realm cannot be altered by the devices of the physical man, within the physical realm – but that it can be changed from without, in the spiritual realm.

We are all on a grave (pun intended) irreversible path living as carnal men. It is only when we hear His voice that our future changes and God already knows (Romans 8:29) which of us can and will hear Him (John 10:26-29) Further, once we have received the indwelling of the Holy Spirit we are no longer carnal and live after the Spirit (Romans 8) growing aware that we are already alive beyond the boundary of this physical realm. (John 3:1-17) That is when our prayers, our free will, has the greatest effect, both in the spiritual realm and the physical realm. (John 15:7)

betty boop, I pinged you because this is similar to our recent email discussion and I hope you may have a comment to share.

Well, that’s my two cents … for what it’s worth.

What a wonderful essay, Alamo-Girl! You sure do know how to home in on essential problems.…

One wonders what possible gratification Lewontin and Pinker manage to derive from such a world view. To postulate free will as an illusion is simultaneously to render as illusionary the substance of human experience as it has actually, historically been lived and manifested (as we know, e.g., from cultural artifacts of all ages available to historical research) since Day One. Talk about denizens of a “Second Reality!” To me, this represents a total estrangement from life in the way real people actually live it, and manifests the symptomology of radical estrangement sited in the self, which betokens isolation not only from the Spiritual community, but from the secular community and the Self also. My two cents, FWIW.

God is not in time. He is not in space. He is not in what humans call space-time at all. Space-time is a four-dimensional construct premised on the way human beings typically perceive and process information about the external world. For all we know, there may be a virtually infinite number of spatial and/or temporal dimensions. But from the human perspective, this really doesn’t matter, since we can only “see” four of them anyway.

The major point is, no matter how many dimensions there are, God is not in any of them. God is entirely “beyond” the physical Universe; or as Plato put it, he is the God of the Beyond, beyond the Cosmos, beyond the Olympian gods who are his creatures, and utterly beyond man.

Yet Plato also seems to suggest the Cosmos is somehow an eikon or “image, reflection” of this unimaginable, eternal, inaccessible God.

For Plato, this God of the Beyond is so remote that, when it came time to creating the Cosmos, he didn’t even do it himself. He sent an agent: the Demiurge, a divine being endued by the God with perfect beauty and goodness, bearing all the marks of the Logos, or what we might call the divine plan of the God; and in his perfect goodness and beauty he wishes to create creatures just as good and beautiful as himself, according to the standard of divine truth.

Similarly to the Christian account, the Demiurge in a certain way creates ex nihilo -- that is, out of Nothing. At first glance, Plato is seen specifying a pre-existing “material” – note that word’s Latin root, mater, “mother,” and its cognate “matter” -- called Chora, which is usually translated either as “Space,” or (paradoxically) “Necessity.”

Chora further seems to indicate the idea of an eternal, universal field of pure potentiality that needs to become “activated” in order to bring actual beings into existence. In itself, it is No-thing, i.e., “nothing.” This “activation” the Demiurge – some kind of “male principle?” -- may not do by fiat: He does not, for instance, “command” to “Let Light Be!” The only tool at his disposal is Peitho, “persuasion.”

And Chora is not exactly anxious to be persuaded: It likes being “nothingness.” [I.e., Chora likes being “lazy”; i.e., entropy is its basic nature, its heart’s desire self-maintenance in the condition of perfect “equilibrium” that expresses non-existence.] It is always free to just “refuse to be persuaded,” thus ever to remain unformed, “Nothing.”

And thus the Demiurge endeavors to persuade potentiality into actual existence, and gives existents their fundamental laws according to the Logos, the “word” of divine Nous, the Mind of the God of the Beyond, and His Will for His creation. <.p> [Methinks Plato was a “closet monotheist,” seemingly the first to arise since the Egyptian pharaoh Amonhotep; but Amonhotep’s monotheist idea seems to have come ’way before its time, and so didn’t survive…. In any case, it seems certain it was Plato who coined the term, “theology,” and in his formulation of the One God Beyond, of monotheism -- at least as prototype. That insight definitely took root in human imagination from thence unto all time, apparently.]

But the Demiurge does more than just get things started: As bearer of the Logos (i.e., universal laws plus a kind of cosmic “information set”), and as pure love and beauty and goodness, he continues thereafter always to work in the creation, to continue to persuade it into ever-new beginnings of creatures, from the Cosmos’ beginning in Eternity, throughtout all Eternity.

Thus Plato’s “creation myth.” The main points to note are:

(1) the universe is eternal (timeless) but it (paradoxically) had a beginning in time. Both Plato and Aristotle were keenly aware that there had to be a beginning in time, a First (Uncaused) Cause, in order for the universe and its contents not only to be in the first place, but also to be the way they are and not some other way. (Leibnitz’s two great questions.)

(2) Thus the universe is governed by divine laws, but not in a deterministic fashion, rather through the power of persuasion. Free will is entirely real on this view.

(3) Through the ongoing activity of the Demiurge, men and the world are constantly being newly “impressed” with and renewed by the divine Logos; and thus a unified, Cosmic whole, a “One Cosmos,” a universal order comes into being and continues to be maintained according to the “specifications” (i.e., our hypothetical “cosmic information set”) of the Logos on an on-going basis.

(4) There is an on-going “erotic tension” between the divine and the creaturely realms of being, a constant outreach (as it were) from the divine side to the human, of a mutual collaboration of spiritual and material aspects of natural existence; together with the response of the latter to the former, in potentially creative collaboration – in which man participates in the divine “as far as that is humanly possible.” In a certain quite mysterious way, this is the “glue” that holds the Universe “together.”

Well, that would be my takeaway from Plato’s great myth, having contemplated it for some time now. The parallels to the Christian exegesis, to Genesis, are (to my mind) quite striking.

The parallels to “Big Bang” cosmology are also quite striking, in my view. And they appear to closely correspond to both the classical and the Christian “myths.”

“Renormalizing” Plato, we could say that the One God of the Beyond is St. Thomas’ Tetragrammatical God, God the Father, unseen by man, and not directly accessible by/to man. The Logos is “Emmanuel,” the “god with us,” that is the Son of God, the Logos of the beginning, who St. John says was God, and was with God, the Word God spoke to invoke Creation. The Demiurge is an “agent” or messenger of God, the Holy Spirit.

We can hypothetically further renormalize the Christian Exegesis into the language of physics, and say the Singularity of the “Big Bang” is God’s spoken Word, the Logos of the Beginning of creation, which specified the nature of the creation to be as a vast “superposition” of all possible initial conditions (i.e., all potential vector states that can possibly arise under the given laws specifed by the Logos). Thus the universe as it “unfolds” may look like a random process, but is in fact constrained to what is possible under the initial (and ever-abiding) structuring laws.

This is to say that the God of Creation created for a foreknown (by Him) purpose. It is in this sense that we can say God is omnisicent and all-powerful, as well as eternally exempt from any kind of constraint that a human being could imagine. For infinite and eternal Divine mind and will and power guarantee the effectiveness of the divine paradigm (i.e., the Logos) in Time. And this Divine mind expresses a God of love, truth, beauty, and justice.

And yet none of the foregoing constitutes an argument favoring determinism: Because man has been left free, all along the way, to reject the Logos. He is free to reject participation in loving relationship with the divine, free to reject spiritual community with man and the other existents of this world; that is, with human community and the biosystem itself, free to refuse to serve as a creative co-collaborator in the revelation of divine purpose. He is free to construct “Second Realities” which, in essence, pose a freely-chosen alternative order as worthy to supplant the divinely-imagined and willed Logos, which finally constitutes the order of the Universe, Second Realities or no.

For as Aristotle pointed out, there is also a Final Cause, toward which everything is proceeding in time, which does not serve or seek to benefit any particular element or constituent of the “collective everything,” but finally seeks realization of itself for its own sake – that is to say, for God’s sake.

Well, it’s time to stop now, since I’ve consumed so much time and bandwidth already. Except for just one last concluding thought.

I am impressed by the close correspondence between the classical and Christian traditions on the questions of the origin, governance, and sustenance of the Universe. These two traditions are the foundational pillars of Western culture, the “matrix” (a word etymologically deriving, yet again, from mater, “mother”) in which you and I are now living.

This tradition is presently hotly contested, embattled and contended against in the world of contemporary human existence and public opinion, largely because people like Lewontin and Pinker have “a serious problem with it,” and have the cultural eclat to dispute the judgment from the Beginning, to render it “socially ineffective,” by means of their respective stations in life and professional prestige, and their own “bright ideas” designed to perfect the Perfect (from the divine point of view, so to speak).

I just don’t know how to begin to understand these guys. First, they grind man into dirt. Then they suggest man might just be as divine as God himself (at least it seems they reserve this distinction for themselves). So just go and try to figure out, untangle, reconcile their totally absurd proposition….

And as I have tried to show, the ancients got a whole lot “right” in their understanding of the essentials constituting living being in an ordered Universe. We, their descendents, would be fools to squander their legacy to us who are now living.

I guess unless a person is just dying to go live in a Second Reality, it would be wise to resist its “siren song.” Or so it seems to me. FWIW.

Thanks so much, A-G, for pinging me to this. Hugs, girl!!!

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